Saturday, April 10, 2010

Lex Rooker interviewed at Joanne Unleashed

Don't miss this excellent interview of a brilliant and honest man who has had great success with a raw carnivorous diet (for example, his migraines and precancerous lesions disappeared with this diet) but does not hide the problems he runs into.

2 comments:

Aaron Richards said...

hello i found your site through dirty carnivore and would like to know if a carnivorous diet is still helping with your skin and if it is the most effective diet you have found for your skin (which other diets did you try?). i suffer from hidradenitis suppuritiva -or acne inverse- and thought i would give a carnivore diet a go. will it get worse before it gets better?

thanks in advance.

Paleo Phil said...

Hi Aaron,
Yes, a facultatively carnivorous (dirty carnivore) diet is still helping with my skin and carnivory is still the most effective diet I have found for my skin and health in general. I've had a small increase lately (mainly a dry spot on my right arm has returned) and there are a few possible factors I can think of: 1) eating more carbs than I had been, though not a lot, 2) not drinking quite as much water as I had been and 3) cold, windy weather lately and turning the heat on.

My version of carnivore is a little different from Lex's in that I currently eat some additional foods beyond raw beef, organs, suet and water, such as other meats and fish, eggs, marrow, kelp, berries, young greens, ginger, wasabi mustard, sauerkraut and occasionally other foods.

In the past the diets I can recall trying included:

- Standard American Diet
- near-vegetarian
- vegetarian (did very poorly very quickly on this so the couple times I tried it did not last long)
- conventional "healthy" diet: a diet recommended by a clinical nutritionist and by many "experts" that included lots of "healthy whole grains," fiber, "plenty of fruits and vegetables," soy products, limited lean meats and so on.
- conventional cooked Paleo (a hybrid of Neanderthin with Cordain's Paleo diet and my own minor touches) including lots of fruits and veggies, and during one period I was eating a lot of squashes and a moderate amount of tubers
- near-fruitarian experiment (quickly went badly)

Q: "i suffer from hidradenitis suppuritiva -or acne inverse- and thought i would give a carnivore diet a go. will it get worse before it gets better?"

I haven't had hidradenitis suppuritiva, but my acne (with some cystic acne) improved fairly quickly when I cut out carbs and didn't get worse before it got better. It probably depends on the individual.

One of Loren Cordain's areas of expertise is acne, so maybe his team at http://thepaleodiet.blogspot.com/ might have some info on hidradenitis suppuritiva.

These look like they might be relevant:

Autoimmune mechanism in the pathogenesis of hidradenitis suppurativa?
"Altered innate and adaptive immune responses in patients with hidradenitis suppurativa."
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17199566

Association between Crohn's disease and hidradenitis suppurativa
"Hidradenitis suppurativa and Crohn's disease: Two cases that support an association."
Acta Dermatovenerol Alp Panonica Adriat. 2010 Oct;19(3):23-5.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20976417